


Mermaid

by Aryllia



Series: Arrow Ace [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexual Character, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Interspecies Relationship(s), Mythical Beings & Creatures, Trans Character, Trolls, mermaid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-06 20:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14655720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aryllia/pseuds/Aryllia
Summary: Life is horrible, let's hide from it.





	Mermaid

Nirmala had lived in the northern fringe of the Norwegian kelp forest a scant few days when she heard a boat motor in the nearby permit water. The boat she found, now drifting, was definitely not there for commercial fishing. It wasn't more than perhaps five meters long, they were close to the shallows and the fishing hook - not even baited - was a sad, lonely sight to see. Decisively, she swam up and politely knocked on the hull before she breached the surface and waved.

“Hello there! Recreational fishing?”

The person in the boat was fat, hairy and had a tail. Troll? Mammal, at any rate, so probably male judging by the torso shape. He was also alone and thoroughly spooked.

“I have a permit”, was the first thing he said, rummaging around in a box, presumably for the slip.

She waved him off in an exaggerated show of nonchalance.

“I’m not with the military, relax. Only there’s nothing around for you to catch right here aside from a few silt crawlers. How far does your permit reach, and what fish do you want? I could get you closer to an aggregation.” Not that she could really give precise directions, everything - even distances - looked different above water. Some actual bait would probably help him immensly as well. 

“Aw, nah, it’s okay. I really just came out here to sort out my thoughts you know. The fishing is more an excuse to get out.”

Nirmala’s face scrunched up in a reflexive grimace. 

“About that. Do. Not. Fish. Alone! This is ocean waters, no people live in permission areas, and your boat is _dinky!_ ” She grabbed the gunwale and yanked to demonstrate.

“It isn- ouf!” He glared at her from where he had landed in the boat. “Fine, but the shore is right _there_ , I’m wearing a life jacket and I’ve got a waterproof phone clipped on. See?” He jangled a bulky, bright orange device - clearly a proofed surface model with a float shell rather than the overpriced deepwater model clipped to Nirmalas net pack. Oh, idea.

“If I give you my phone number, you could text me if you get another stupid impulse to go out on open water alone. I’ll stick to the ocean floor, you won’t see me but I’ll notice if you get in trouble. Sound good?”

He was already unclipping the phone, but he was tense.

“Well, okay. But why does it bother you so much, and didn’t you say no one lives here? Why are you even here?"

_Because I'm squatting right at the border between civilization and the permit area where your corpse is likely to drift if you drown._

“You’re not the only one who needs to get out. It would ease my conscience.”

It was a weak explanation, but before Nirmala submerged they sorted out their respective phone numbers and names all the same. His name was Petri.

 

Petri actually did text her the next time he went fishing,  and they sent each other a few lines while she watched the shadow of his boat far above her and picked sea urchins apart. It became a routine, Petri coming out at least once a week, after checking that she’d be there. He told her that he worked in the harbour, loading and unloading cargo, but that his family (a whole shoal by the sound of it) had wanted him to go to university and become a doctor or solicitor. She told him a lot less about working as a freelance sea witch, the many uses of sea urchin and sent pictures of the surrounding flora, fauna and rocks. 

Once she snuck up to the surface and threw a cod at him, partially so he’d have something to show for his fishing trips. Mostly because it gave her a good cackle to see him struggle with a fish longer than his torso.

The routine had gone on for almost two months when she got very different text from Petri.

_"Coming out with someone. Can’t text until he’s gone. Don’t surface. Talk later."_

Of course, the only logical thing to do was to was to hug the rocks at the shore-side of Petri’s permitted fishing area and spy on them. She sent a grateful thought to whoever had constructed the permit area, as long as she kept her dorsal fin relaxed down her head and back then her dark scales would blend seamlessly with the wet rocks. 

Petri looked different. She couldn't quite put her claw on what it was, he was as tense as he was back when she first saw him, but that wasn't all. Something about his hair maybe, or his clothes perhaps, though it was dificult to see them under the life jacket. Reading mammals wasn’t exactly her forte either. The person he was fishing with looked kind of like him, but was larger, and somehow even more hairy and fat than Petri. Like a walrus wrapped in a fur coat.

Well, the winters were cold on the surface around here, so presumably they needed the extra insulation. Maybe it was Petri who was small. Nirmala should give him another cod next time he went fishing.

Without a spyglass there wasn’t really anything else she could see from a distance, but she kept to the rock and observed for as long as she could without drying out.

 

The next time Petri came out he looked normal, except still really tense. Nirmala crawled up in the boat so that he wouldn’t have to lean over the gunwale. It wasn't comfortable, with the boat being only a little longer than she was and Petri trying to sit down next to her once he was sure the boat wouldn't capsize.

“You won’t dry out or suffocate or something?”, he asked.

She took a breath. It burned a little to not have her gills submerged, definitely wasn’t comfortable.

“I’m probably good for an hour at least. So. Last time?”

“My cousin. He doesn’t know that I, well-.”

“That you’re talking with a mermaid?” She certainly would get at least a little truble if anyone found out she'd been talking to a troll unsupervised.

“That too, but that’s not a big deal I think. He doesn’t know I’m - Petri isn’t my name legally see, it’s Petra. Sorry I’m still figuring out how to explain this. Outside of a few online forums I mean.”

Turned out the reason Petri had looked different was (mainly) because he hadn’t been wearing his binder - a kind of vest to hide mammaries, which apparently were naturally massive in trolls. On the topic of mass, Nirmala remembered to ask about, and get it confirmed that trolls were naturally fat to survive winter easier, and Petri was smaller than males should be be on behalf of having a female body. Nirmala took some enjoyment in ribbing him for having backwards sexual dimorphism, which he took in good spirit.

“Thing is, my family, they mean well, they really do, but they are so adamant that I will make myself miserable if I don’t have some spouses and two dozen children. I don’t even know what to address first with them. That I want to transition before I think of settling down, that I don’t really care about having kids, _really_ don’t want to get pregnant, that I think I’d be okay with just having someone to talk to and go on dates with instead of a full-sized family. I have four parents and eleven siblings, but I don’t know if any of them would be okay with _all_ of that mess. How does mermaid families work? I tried to look it up couldn’t find anything."

 _Because it’s none of your business,_ was the official answer.

 _Because it’s dangerous to expose how your children are raised underwater,_  would have been the polite reply. Well, no. The polite and intelligent reply would have been to deflect the question and tell Petri that he wasn't a mess and nothing of what he'd said sounded that strange.

But Petri wasn’t the only one who needed to talk to someone.

“That’s cause they don’t work. Families, I mean, we don’t have them the way you do. And it’s getting worse, I think. There’s this movement to revamp, well, _everything_ so that it becomes more like how you do it surface-side, but especially what happens to kids. It’s been brewing for ages, and there’s well-known public figures on both side of the conflict. Anyone who wasn’t already arguing on the issue is arguing which celebrity or politician is more credible. And neither side is good. Everything is bad, we just can’t agree what is worse.”

She was on the very edge of what she could get away with saying. But it was just her and Petri here, and sounds carry poorly in air. So she pushed aside the thought of clipped fins and stones around her neck and sinking into the real Depths that would slowly crush her as she fell fell fell - and she pushed on.

 _Rather than messing with family politics, couldn’t we abolish excessively slow and painful methods of execution?_ Nirmala had heard about hanging and beheading and poisons, and it seemed like a much easier way to get the same result in a much more reliable fashion.

“Thing is, every year there’s the spawning and in every spawn a single mer can produce hundreds of eggs that get fertilized all at the same time. Right now over 90% die because we don’t _do_ parenting. It sounds cruel to you, I guess. But if we’re going to revamp everything then we’ll either end up with an out of this world population boom or we have to - I don’t know. Stop spawning? We can’t just stop producing a ton of eggs and milt, it’ll come out whether we want it to or not. There’s no good solution.”

Well, hiding in the wilderness was a kind of solution, but it wouldn't get anyone any closer to the one-to-six-per-couple child average that seemed to exist on the surface. One hundred or none was a rather extreme gap in child numbers. 

“Oh. Yeah, that sounds like you’d get something like how fairies does it, where only the queens get to reproduce freely. But they’re like that biologically, I'm not sure if females that aren’t queens are even fertile. Even if you could force yourself to be like that it would go dystopian real quick. Though, yeah, letting nine out of ten kids die because they’re surplus is kind of dystopian too. My parents would probably have a massive breakdown if nine of their twelve kids died.”

“Well, it’s easier if you don’t get to know them other than as a clump of eggs.”

She was dismayed to see Petri stand up and busy himself with something at the side of the boat, where she couldn't see his face. Maybe this really had been a bad idea.

“How many?”

“This year, last year, the one before that. Statistically, somewhere between three and thirty. Enough that I don't feel motivated to fight for either side.”

At least half of this year’s bunch would be dead by now, though those who had survived from her first batch would probably have grouped up with others their age to shoal by now, so the casualties among them would drop significantly to a scant few percent until they were old enough to spawn. If they'd be allowed to spawn. 

She was thrown out of her moment of moping by a bucket of water to the face. Petri, holding the bucket, looked as small and apologetic as any 1.90 meter massive mammal could.

“Sorry, but you kind of stink when your mucus stuff dries.”

It took another two buckets to rehydrate her, as they mulled over each others rants.

“So how long do you figure we can hide out here to avoid our problems?” Petri asked, again seated beside her.

Nirmala gave him a sidelong glance. He was fiddling with the tuft of hair at the end of his tail, not looking at her.

“I planned to be a hermit already when I got here, and am fully equipped to stay indefinitely.”

Paying for the phone and internet service would get tricky, freelancing as a sea witch isn't lucrative business without an aggregation of potential customers around. But it was possible, at least for as long as she could forage and hunt everything else she needed.

“How do you feel about staging a fake tragic interspecies romance to assure my family that I won’t be alone forever, give me a plausible excuse for not having kids and to move closer to the ocean where they won’t see me dressed as a man?”

He still wasn't looking at her, which was probably just as well. She had seen enough soap operas and romantic comedies that it was difficult to not burst into laughter at the thought.

“That sounds like a _horrible_ idea. When do I get to meet your parents?”

**Author's Note:**

> ~Post credits scenes~  
> 30 years later they are still fake dating, now with a house boat and a small shoal of adopted mermaid kids. Said kids are mostly indifferent to the adoption, but at least they don't try to eat Petri any more. 
> 
> Mermaid society is still in upheaval and has splintered to allow small fractions of the population to experiment with different forms of parenting structures. 
> 
> Nirmala still think they are out of their minds, Petri is still fishing without bait. 
> 
> By the time Petri came out as transgender to his famly everyone except his great-grandma Eliza had already figured it out, and great-grandma Eliza didn't care as long as he showed up for the midsummer potluck every year. 
> 
>    
>  **Actual author's note**  
>  In Swedish mythology, we separate our creatures into solitary creatures and collective creatures. The dead, the rå and the tomte are usually solitary. Vättar, troll and diser (fairies) are cellective creatures that usually show up in groups. And trolls are my favourite mythological cretures, so of course I wanted many of them. So I doubled up and made them polyamorous super families with hoards of children.


End file.
